Month: September 2010

[We are very happy to welcome Donald Pfanz to Mysteries and Conundrums. The following is the product of his extensive work on the creation of the National Cemetery, which we’ll soon be publishing as part of our publication series. ]

Skeletons in the Wilderness. Scenes like this stimulated the Federal government to take action, and so they dispatched a regiment to accord the dead proper burial.

In June 1865, in response to clamorous complaints about the dead left unburied on the battlefields around Fredericksburg, the Federal government dispatched the 1st U.S. Veteran Volunteers to undertake reburial of the bodies. The 1st Volunteers reached Fredericksburg late on the afternoon of June 10 and pitched its tents on the south side of the Rappahannock River. Some wandered the streets of the shell-torn town; others walked across the plain leading to Marye’s Heights, where Union arms had suffered defeat on December 13, 1862. Unlike the Union soldiers who had perished in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House, most of those who had died at Fredericksburg had been buried immediately after the battle. William Landon, who had fought at Fredericksburg as a member of the 14th Indiana Infantry, took the opportunity to search the town for the graves of comrades who had fallen there. He found but one: Corporal John E. Hutchins of Company B, the “Old Post Guards.”

Landon and his comrades resumed their march the next morning, heading west along one of two roads: the Orange Turnpike or the Orange Plank Road. By noon, the First Regiment reached Chancellorsville. The charred remains of the Chancellor house and the scattered remnants of blankets, knapsacks, and other equipment bore silent witness to the fierce struggle that had been waged there. Passing on, the regiment reached the Wilderness Battlefield late that afternoon. The soldiers bivouacked on the northern end of the battlefield at an abandoned goldmine– possibly the Woodville Mine. No sooner had they arrived than “a crowd of half-starved women and children” and a few men in Confederate uniform flooded into the camp, hoping to trade garden vegetables for food that the soldiers carried in their wagons. “All the rations we could spare were freely given them,” wrote Landon, but the demand far exceeded the supply and many went away hungry.

Wilderness Cemetery #1, created June 1865, and in existence for just over one year. Brevet Major Moore enclosed Wilderness National Cemetery No. 1 with a simple board fence. Each of the headboards visible in the photograph appears to read: "Uknown U.S. Soldiers Killed May 1864"

In 1989, Congress expanded the park’s mandate by stipulating that in addition to interpreting the military aspects of the four battles, we will also interpret the war’s impact on civilians. Fulfilling this mandate has made my job especially interesting–allowing us to look at sites through different thematic lenses and in the process generating a huge body of new source material that at least until Noel Harrison came along, no one paid much mind to.

Though I have been in my job for a very long time, I am constantly amazed at the rate we learn new things–the rate at which new material tumbles into our hands. Some of that material brings new light to well-known stories or places; sometimes something entirely new turns up. The historical record grows, and so does our understanding of the resources we manage and interpret. Along the way, the scope of our interpretive programs has broadened (without, by the way, diminishing what we do in the realm of military history); the incoming source material has added immensely to the richness and variety of our programs.

This week is a perfect example of the flow of new stuff. This picture came from the files of the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation.

Courtesy Historic Fredericksburg Foundation

It demonstrates vividly that I have been wrong in my presumed location of the Maria Wolfe house on Princess Anne Street–one of four buildings in Fredericksburg definitively associated with Clara Barton. I had presumed the house still stood next to the Baptist Church–that it was was and is the place now occupied by Micah Ministries. Instead, this image clearly shows that Wolfe’s house once stood where the church offices are, and is gone. Here’s one of those awkward cases where not only does something add to your knowledge, but it shows you were WRONG. But, we will be right henceforth. Here is a better picture of the now-vanished house, provided to us by Dennis Sacrey of the Fredericksburg Baptist Church.

The Maria Wolfe house on Princess Anne Street. Courtesy Dennis Sacrey and the Fredericksburg Baptist Church.

Poking around on footnote.com, Eric Mink turned up the claim filed by grocer John B. Alexander of Fredericksburg for four slaves who were “abducted, harbored, and carried off” by the Union army in July and December of 1862. We know, of course, that these slaves (Frances, Betty, George, and Horace) were probably not “abducted,” but rather opted for freedom within Union lines themselves–part of one of the park’s most powerful emerging stories. I wish I had found this before my Slavery and Slave Places tour a few weeks ago.

An item like this helps us illustrate several things: the exodus of slaves that attended the arrival of the Union army, the obvious struggle and challenges the end of slavery posed for local slaveowners, and–most vividly–the idea that slavery was far more than just the relationship between owner, overseer, and slave. As Alexander’s claim shows, slavery was (even before the founding of the Confederacy) sustained by the power of government. Alexander’s claim (click here to see a transcript) seeks reimbursement from the Confederate government for the value of these people (a total of $3,500, as attested by local slave trader George Aler).

(Eric also turned up a document reflecting on the Confederate field hospital where Jackson was treated at Chancellorsville, but that’s worth a separate post of its own.)

click to enlarge

And finally, I received yesterday from Breck O’Donnell, a high school student who is plowing through issues of the Richmond Examiner for Fredericksburg material, a copy of what is likely the best single Fredericksburg-written account of the Union occupation of 1862. It was originally published in the Virginia Herald of Fredericksburg in September 1862. No copies of that paper survive from the war period, and so this find is especially useful. It is full of both new details and editorial commentary, much of it wonderful. Among the review of perceived Union atrocities: “The living were prohibited from visiting the dying, and that too when the houses were almost in sight’ the dead were not allowed the privilege of Christian sepulture, inasmuch as at least one coffin was refused the privilege of passing out from town for the corpse awaiting it in the country.”

We’ll be publishing it in the upcoming CVBT journal, Fredericksburg History and Biography. It’s a wonderful piece.